Changing it up with a light, light (it weighs less than most cars) general aviation flight up the coast of Southern California. One of the most underrated airplanes in Infinite Flight, in my opinion, is the XCub, CubCrafters’s successor to its popular Carbon Cub EX. The airframe pairs the general design of Piper’s legendary PA-18 Super Cub, rendered with contemporary composite materials, with a modern glass cockpit, a 180-horsepower Lycoming O-360-C1, and a Hartzell 2-blade composite propeller. These neat little airplanes have their forerunner’s legendary short-field capability, but perhaps due to a combination of fondness for large commercial aircraft and a lack of 3D general aviation airports, they’re somewhat overlooked. However, as time passes and more 3D airports are added, particularly in the rural U.S. and Canada where short takeoff and landing (STOL) abilities are in demand, the XCub will get more attention than it has in the past.
Server: Solo
Operator: Private
Aircraft: CubCrafters CC19 XCub (Yellow)
Origin: Oceanside Municipal Airport, Oceanside, California (OKB)
Destination: Hawthorne Municipal Airport, Hawthorne, California (HHR)
Callsign: N17XC
Route: KOKB-KHHR
Seat: N/A
Time En Route: 49 Minutes
Walking out to our bright yellow XCub on one of the numerous tiedowns at Oceanside Municipal Airport, also known as Bob Maxwell Memorial Field, on a partly-cloudy day after almost a week of largely uninterrupted rain. Ironically enough, the paint scheme on this next-generation Super Cub is not historically accurate, at least in a general sense: it’s painted in the classic “Cub Yellow” that adorned so many J-3 Cubs, while most Super Cubs were finished in two-tone paintjobs consisting of a white primary with a secondary trim, usually some variety of red, blue, or green.
The carbon-fiber 2-bladed Hartzell spins up as the 4-cylinder Lycoming in the nose coughs, catches, and roars to life. CubCrafters has provided an excellent avionics and instrument suite for its latest Super Cub-based offering (though as of now it has a tricycle-gear XCub available, effectively reinventing the PA-22 Tri Pacer as a long-wing, 2-place, tandem-seat airplame), one that William T. Piper would scarcely have dreamed of.
Getting airborne from Oceanside as an ultra-rare Beechcraft Baron 56TC (a fire-breathing testbed for the Beechcraft 60 Duke’s TIO-541 turbocharged flat-6 engines that made it into series production) turns off the runway after arriving from Santa Barbara
Heading out towards the Pacific in our little yellow airplane
Cruising up the Pacific Coast along the I-5 freeway. It’s a bit surreal being out over the water in a tiny XCub, as opposed to the airliners and occasional Challenger 350 or TBM 930 we’re used to.
Still following the 5 over Orange County, as we near the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, which was the main USMC fast jet base on the West Coast until the leathernecks moved down the 5 to Miramar and the Navy sent the Tomcats to Oceana and the Hawkeyes to Point Mugu. We’re flying IFR, IFR meaning “I Follow Roads”, of course.
We’ve made the turn towards Hawthorne and are still following the freeway as we approach the airport - this time, the 105
Landing at Jack Northrop Field, named for the aviation pioneer and founder of the company that built such iconic designs as the N-9 series of flying wings, P-61 Black Widow/F-15 Reporter, XP-55 Black Bullet, YB-35/49 flying wing bombers (the -35 had 4x Pratt and Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major 4-row, 28-cylinder radial engines and the -49 had 8x Allison J35 turbojet engines), the F-89 Scorpion, the F-5 Freedom Fighter/Tiger family, the T-38 Talon, the B-2 Spirit, and the YF-23 Black Widow II. We’re a bit rusty in taildraggers, fishtailing slightly on touchdown before getting the airplane steady on the ground.
Shutting down the engine on one of the tie-downs
Parked at HHR with the Hawthorne ATC tower in the background. This was a really fun flight with a really fun little airplane, and it’ll be a more common appearance in future trip reports!